Part 8. A Doe, a Deer, a female Deer.  Solmization and manuscipt as we know it today.

For this installment we fast-forward in time to start of the First Millennium AD. 1025 to be precise the place is Arezzo Italy.

By this time singing in churches had become common practice for many centuries, but during the medieval period a new type of singing while accompanied by church organ called Organum emerged, this was more complex and often included the singing of 3 part harmonies .

These arrangements were a lot more complex to remember than the previous forms of music, both from a performance level and for the music teachers to remember and teach.

For the last thousand years the way to learn new music was entirely by ear, listening to the teacher sing and in turn memorizing it.

Singers and teachers had to memorize the entire song repertoire, and they then would have to teach the chants to the next generation of singers.
Just like Chinese whispers, due to memory errors and subjective tastes the chants would change or contain errors over the years..

In fact it normally took 10 years to teach Choir their chants!

Around the 9th century there evolved a form of musical notation, it had a lot to do with ancient Greek music theory but only catered for tetrachords and was mainly used by music theorists.

The musicians themselves  preferred a form of mnemonic devices called neumes, used as a kind of reminder of the melodies that they had already memorized, but this was not very accurate, and could only serve if you already had learned the song in question.

Enter the 20 year old, French born, Benedictine Monk, Guido, he had been forced to move to Arezzo from the monastery of Pomposa because he had started to experiment with his inventive non traditional ways to teach the choir.
His new benefactor Bishop Tedald was happy for him continue his experiments on his choir at Arezzo as long as he fulfilled his roles as Conductor.

Guido believed that there must be a more efficient way to teach, and to keep record of the music.

Being an exceptionally clever chap, Guido came up with multiple solutions to his problem.

Taking elements from the theorists notation and the experimental notation of neumes, he created a codified system system that used staff lines, he added 2 more lines to the theorists sytem and also used the space between the notes.  He gave the notes letters instead of numbers. (no -one tell Pythagarus!!!)

He then composed a melody to a Latin hym called ‘Ut Quent Laxis’, and then introduced a system of solmization called the solfegge.
To do this he incrementally assigned the first syllable of each hymn line one of the six tones used in the hexachord (the scale used at the time). So the notes were C,D,E,F, G and A.

ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la

UT queant laxis
REsonare fibris
MIra gestorum
FAmuli tuorum
SOLve polluti
LAbii reatum

Later when the octave scale was replaced by the hexachord, an additional syllable si or ti was added and eventually do came to replace ut.

Once singers could replace the words sung with the syllables sung it became easier for them to remember the sequence of notes as a sequence of the syllables.

But Guido didn’t stop there, he also created another mnenomic system that became known as the Guidonian Hand.

Each note or syllable is assigned to each finger tip joint  and knucke of one hand, this helped choirs to site sing, if they could learn the pattern on their hand they could sing the pattern on their hand!

The impact of Guido’s notational and teaching inventions are immense.

Thanks to his new form of musical notation people who had never heard a song before , did not have to rely on someone who knew it to learn from,  the individual could translate and learn it from manuscript!

His musical notation has survived largely unchanged,  slightly evolved to the one we use today.

With his new methods of teaching, he was able to teach the choir their entire song repertoire in 2 instead of 10 years!

Infact his solmisation method was still being taught in almost it’s original form well into the 18th Century more than 800 years later.

.. not to mention the fact that with out Guido we would never have…

Doe, a deer, a female deer
Ray, a drop of golden sun
Me, a name I call myself
Far, a long, long way to run

So… so le’st tip our metaphorical hat to Guido the man that brought us Modern Music notation and err…. The sound of music.?

Next chapter, we discover out what the hell clocks have to do with Automatic Music.. wanna know?  CLICK HERE

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